• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: Emergence of a floral colour polymorphism by pollinator-mediated overdominance
  • Beteiligte: Kellenberger, Roman T.; Byers, Kelsey J. R. P.; De Brito Francisco, Rita M.; Staedler, Yannick M.; LaFountain, Amy M.; Schönenberger, Jürg; Schiestl, Florian P.; Schlüter, Philipp M.
  • Erschienen: Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2019
  • Erschienen in: Nature Communications
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07936-x
  • ISSN: 2041-1723
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  • Anmerkungen:
  • Beschreibung: <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Maintenance of polymorphism by overdominance (heterozygote advantage) is a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology. In most examples known in nature, overdominance is a result of homozygotes suffering from deleterious effects. Here we show that overdominance maintains a non-deleterious polymorphism with black, red and white floral morphs in the Alpine orchid <jats:italic>Gymnadenia rhellicani</jats:italic>. Phenotypic, metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses reveal that the morphs differ solely in cyanidin pigments, which are linked to differential expression of an <jats:italic>anthocyanidin synthase</jats:italic> (<jats:italic>ANS</jats:italic>) gene. This expression difference is caused by a premature stop codon in an <jats:italic>ANS-</jats:italic>regulating <jats:italic>R2R3-MYB</jats:italic> transcription factor, which is heterozygous in the red colour morph. Furthermore, field observations show that bee and fly pollinators have opposite colour preferences; this results in higher fitness (seed set) of the heterozygous morph without deleterious effects in either homozygous morph. Together, these findings demonstrate that genuine overdominance exists in nature.</jats:p>
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